Dancing With Love could just as easily be called Twelve Shades of Love, as each of the tracks on the album is an illustration of a typical love: unrequited love, perfect love, earthly love, spiritual and transcendent love, and so on. The musical style varies from one piece to the next, although there are common features that serve as a cohesive link throughout the cycle.
These traits take the form of vocal and melodic lines strongly inspired by traditional Persian songs, a resolutely tonal harmonic support and a finely detailed, highly refined orchestration. This includes Western instruments, of course, but also traditional instruments such as the tombak, the daf and the tar.
Afarin Mansouri, an Iranian-Canadian composer based in Toronto, sings her scores very well, fusing a pleasant classical mezzo with convincing high notes, and a well-balanced ‘popular’ voice. There is also an eloquent tenor, Milad Bagheri, whose beautiful voice reminds me a little of that of Kiya Tabassian of the Constantinople ensemble in Montreal. The composer is used to mixing Eastern and Western learned genres. She has written operas infused with this mix, often premiered by Toronto’s excellent Tapestry Opera.
Thin Edge Music Collective is a Toronto-based group specializing in new music and also plays very well.
Dancing With Love is an album that is substantially outside the usual playground of the Centredisques/Centrediscs label. Usually, it presents Canadian repertoire for symphony orchestra, chamber orchestra or soloists in a specifically Western style. Although this offering is much more akin to a so-called ‘world music’ product, or folk song arrangements, we can’t blame the label for giving its attention this time to an original artist and a very interesting voice in Canadian music today. I confess that I would very much like to hear her operas, in order to make a comparison and see if the inclusion of contemporary and Western contemporary techniques and sounds is more prevalent. For the moment, I’m seduced enough to be curious about the rest of her catalogue. You probably will be too, especially if non-Western sounds appeal to you as much as they do to me.
